In a Distant Valley, page 20
“I lost my shoe,” Greg says, his voice weird and hollow. “And my sock.”
“So put them back on.”
“They’re gone.”
She slogs through the snow to stand beside him, and he leans on her, still holding his bare foot, as they search the ground. He’s right. No shoes or socks anywhere to be found.
“What am I supposed to do?”
Angela has never seen his brown eyes so round or so horrified, not even that day at the river when he grabbed her before the water could whisk her away and turn her to nothing but memory. She remembers him as the eight-year-old boy she decided would be her best friend the day she saw him alone at recess, searching for four-leaf clovers at the edge of the playground. You can’t find them if you look too hard, she told him. You have to kind of glaze your eyes and let them find you.
“Fuck, Angie, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know how to keep going.”
She lifts his arm and wraps it around her shoulders, accepting the weight.
“Like this,” she says.
No, she said.
Not like this, she said.
Stop, she said.
As it was happening, all she could do was try to catch glimpses of the sky above Mason’s head. He blocked nearly the entire cosmos, but a few times, she was able to see a patch of sunset colors—pink and ruby and tangerine, clouds the color of her mother’s favorite lilac tree. When she concentrated hard, she could smell those clouds—sweet scent of springtime—and when she closed her eyes, she could hear Momma’s voice.
Miracle, her mother said, the way it comes back every year. Even after a shitty winter, these flowers just keep blooming.
“I can’t, Angie.”
“You can.”
“My foot’s going to fall off.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“Just leave me here and go find help.”
“I’m not fucking leaving you, Greg. It’s just a little further.”
The forest doesn’t end. The forest keeps on going.
A long time ago, when she was still a child, her father told Angela that a tree does not view itself as a single tree, but instead as the entire forest.
When she was a little older, while out on a walk around Dalton, her mother told Angela to pull her eyes off the ground so she could see the sky and all its evening colors.
“Hold on,” Angela says to Greg. “Let’s take a break.”
She can feel all his muscles shaking. He’s bitten his lips so hard they’re cracked and bleeding. His foot is turning purple.
“We’re going to die out here.”
“Shut up.”
She thinks he’s probably right—the odds are against them. Every part of her hurts; every part of her has been hurting for a long time. But it’s one thing to go into the forest alone to let it bury you, and it’s something completely different to let it claim one of the only people you’ve ever cared about.
Ignoring Greg’s ragged breath, Angela looks up to see a sky not quite as white as it was a century ago, or a second ago. The trees look a little thinner. And maybe it’s a hallucination, but it seems like the snow has started to slow.
In a birch tree about a dozen yards away, there’s another red flash as the cardinal reveals itself. It lands on a low branch and cocks its head in their direction.
And then it sings, just a little. A few notes, repeating and repeating and repeating.
“Break’s over,” Angela tells Greg. “We have to keep going.”
“I’m so tired.”
“We’re almost out.”
“I can’t.”
Without thinking, she presses her lips against his and breathes what little warmth she can into his shivering mouth.
“Yes,” she says when she pulls away. “You can.”
They haven’t walked much further when she spots something solid through the trees—a house, maybe, or a sugar shack. She nudges Greg to a halt and squints toward the snow-robed trees where she saw it.
“Angie,” says Greg. “I need to stop.”
“Hush,” she says, and she watches the forest, every nerve heightened and waiting. Her hair has frozen into ropes that crackle in the dry air. Her fingers and toes have gone numb, all the blood pooling somewhere in the cage of her chest.
Jesus, Mason said to her that night the crickets screamed. Stop fighting it.
Eventually she did stop fighting. But Jesus had nothing to do with it.
It was the smell of lilacs, and her mother’s voice, and the memory of a deer kissing apple blossoms, and something else Angela couldn’t name, some kind of stillness that rippled down from the sky like invisible waves of light, breathing for her when she couldn’t remember how. Expanding, contracting, working her lungs like bellows, keeping her alive.
A few more steps. A little bit further.
Suddenly the trees end, and they’re standing outside a wooden fence that stretches to the left and the right. On the other side of the fence is the structure Angela saw before. It’s a stable, massive doors ajar wide enough for her to hear the snorting of horses inside their stalls. Though the sky is still low and gray, the snow has stopped falling. If her instincts are right, dusk will fall soon—any longer, and they would’ve been in that forest at night. Wouldn’t have lasted until the next morning.
“We’re okay, Greg,” says Angela, not quite believing it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees another flash of color, yellow this time. She turns to see a long coat attached to a woman with hair the color of morning sunlight. Nothing about this woman, who Angela understands by degrees is Molly Lannigan as she emerges from the stable and runs toward them, looks anything like Momma. But in all the ways that count, this figure in the deep sparkling snow is her mother, has always been her mother, lunging over the fence to open her arms and welcome Angela back to the world of the living.
SPROUT
She’s working at it, Tommy will give her that much, but it isn’t going anywhere. Maybe it’s the Joan Jett song he can hear through the thin walls of the bar. They’ve been in the bathroom too long, Tommy crammed between the toilet and the sink, slippery with soap from the broken dispenser. The girl’s hair has fallen to the side, and the mole on the back of her neck is freaking him out—when she moves just right, it looks like a dead spider curled up on her skin.
“That’s it,” she says every time she stops to rest her jaw, pulling him with her hand like she’s milking a cow. “You got it, baby.”
When she first sat down next to him at the bar, Tommy thought he might know her. When he asked if they went to school together, she laughed. Like you could forget, she said, and he laughed, too, because fuck if he was going to admit he had no clue what she was talking about. Especially not after she started pushing her tits against his arm when she leaned in to talk. Remember that pit party with Harvey and Stacey and all them? And Tommy could only drink and nod along, pretending to understand. She wore too much mascara, but he liked her smile, and the way she smelled like some kind of flower.
In here now, though, she only smells like sweat, and neither of them is smiling.
“That’s it, baby,” she mumbles, jerking her wrist to the rhythm of the song—he wonders if she’s doing it on purpose. “Come on.”
“It’d go a whole lot quicker if you’d just let me fuck you.”
“I already told you, no. This is what I want to do.”
She squeezes, a little too hard, then takes him back in her mouth. But even as she does, he feels himself go soft, and she lets out a sigh through her nose before spitting him out and rising from her knees.
“Can’t say I didn’t try,” she says.
Then she starts fixing her hair in the mirror above the sink, singing under her breath and staring at herself with a stupid smirk. She doesn’t look at him—it’s like he’s not here, and it will always go like this for him, lonely even when he’s close enough to inhale someone else’s breath.
As she turns on the faucet to wash him off her hands, Tommy comes up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist. He forces himself to kiss her on the neck even though that mole makes all the afternoon’s vodka creep back up into his throat.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s try again.”
When she tries to squirm away, Tommy tightens his grip, and there’s a moment where they stare at each other in the mirror, neither of them sure how this might go. If he wanted to, he could hurt her, take whatever he wants, and the little bit of fear in her pale blue eyes tells him she knows it.
“You really don’t remember?” she asks.
“What’s there to remember?”
“I was a couple years behind you in school. We were at that pit party when I was, like, fourteen?”
“There were a lot of pit parties.”
“Well, at this one, I drank too much, and that pervy cousin of yours tried to drag me off to the woods. But you stopped him.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
Tommy drops his arms from her waist and steps away, zipping his fly. Her hair has fallen to the side again, and the mole is staring at him harder than ever. She has no idea what she’s talking about. He’s never saved anyone from anything.
“You don’t know my name, do you?”
“Don’t matter now, does it?”
He needs to puke, or maybe he needs another drink.
“Weird,” says the girl. “For so long, you were kind of my hero. It was, like, the biggest story of my life. And you don’t even remember.”
When she leaves, he lets the vomit come up, watching from a million miles away as the mess splatters into the chemical blue water of the toilet. That smell—sour vodka and last night’s beer and other unknown stomach contents—that is the smell of his childhood.
This is who you are, Sprout. Who you’re always gonna be.
When Tommy steps out of the bathroom a few minutes later, he’s surprised to see so many people milling around the pool table and up near the bar. Couples and groups are crowded around tables and booths, everyone laughing and talking loud enough to almost drown out a new song on the jukebox, one Tommy can’t name even though he’s heard it a thousand times before. Something about thunder. Some of the people look familiar—the old doctor and his bitchy wife, Ollie Levasseur, the lady from the post office—but all the other faces blur into one big blob in the neon beer signs. Under his feet, the floor feels like it’s made of ocean waves, rolling on and on until he’s so dizzy he could puke again, if he hadn’t already puked everything out the first time.
Why are there so many people out on a Monday night, during a snowstorm? Was the crowd this thick before he and the girl went to the bathroom and he had too many drinks to notice, or did they all show up while she was failing to get him off?
Tommy stands at the edge of the room, sure the girl is somewhere at the center, telling anyone who will listen what he could have done to her in the bathroom. Making the story bigger, telling lies—He forced me. Or maybe they’re laughing as she tells them other things—Couldn’t stay hard. Any second now, they’ll all look at him, point their fat fingers in his face and call him a faggot or worse.
For a second, he sees it so clear it’s like it’s really happening: Everyone turned against him, surrounding him until he’s a speck of nothing at their mercy. There’s one way out of an angry crowd like that, only one thing that can blast away so much hate stacked against him, and he was dumb enough to leave it out in the truck. He hears his father’s voice in his head like the crack of that shotgun itself.
Show them some goddamn teeth.
And in that moment, Tommy is ready to fight, ready to raise his fists against the whole fucking world.
Then a guy with a mustache—another name he can’t remember—turns to him and grins.
“Great news, isn’t it?”
“What news?”
“Those kids.”
“What kids?”
“Greg Fortin and the Muse girl. Molly Lannigan found them out behind her house. They’ve been missing.”
Tommy doesn’t understand any of it—not the idea of kids gone missing, or being found, or that girl claiming he saved her from something terrible all those years ago. What pervy cousin was she talking about? He has too many to count.
Shouldering his way through clumps of people, Tommy makes his way back to the bar, where his jacket is still draped on a bar stool. Someone else is sitting there now, a blonde woman with beer foam caught on her upper lip.
“Hey,” says Tommy. “I was sitting there.”
The woman ignores him.
“That’s my spot.”
The woman keeps talking to the man beside her.
“Move your ass, you stupid cunt.”
The woman laughs and leans against the back of the stool, pressing herself into the fabric of Tommy’s jacket.
Tommy wonders if he’s become invisible, which is the power he used to wish for when he was a kid. Invisibility meant safety. But now, his brain a half-inflated balloon and the floor trying to pitch him off his feet, surrounded by all these people talking and laughing and raising toasts to kids who made it out of the woods, Tommy realizes invisibility is just another kind of hurt. Because suddenly he’s slipped past a world where everyone hates him and into one where nobody sees him at all.
He needs another drink, but Mellie is standing all the way at the end of the bar, handing out champagne to a pack of women like they’re royalty, and Tommy could kill them all. Wring their necks. It’s no good in a place like this. He needs another drink; he needs air; he has never felt so desperate just to breathe before.
He needs to go somewhere he can’t be ignored. Somewhere people who matter might see him. Somewhere he used to be loved, or at least shown a little respect.
HOPELESSLY DEVOTED
A house made of snow is surprisingly warm—this is what Rose thinks as she sits huddled with Brandon and Adam in the igloo they have spent the past several hours building. This snow-house might actually be warmer than the trailer, which is pretty depressing if she lets herself think about it too much.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” asks Adam, voice hushed as he curls his body against hers.
Brandon’s head falls heavier on her shoulder. “Do you like it in here, Mumma?”
Red and gold flickers from the Christmas lights outside the trailer peek through the cracks of the igloo, splashing across the boys’ cocoa-stained faces.
“It’s perfect,” Rose says. “I love it in here.”
“Could you live here forever?”
“Would it be with you two?”
“Obviously.”
“Then yes. For sure, I could live here forever.”
The snowy ground is more comfortable than any bed she has ever slept on. She is warm and sleepy, belly full of the grilled cheese she made for lunch. No wonder bears choose to sleep inside their dens all winter. It’s a sort of magic, she thinks. Hibernation.
“Mumma?”
“Yeah?”
“I have to poop.”
And the spell is broken.
On their way across the yard, Rose hears the phone inside ringing—she’s heard it several times over the past few hours, but no way she was going to leave the kids unattended in a house that might collapse. If it was important, she told herself, watching the boys build walls out of snow, the caller would leave a message.
As they step into the kitchen, though, whoever is on the other line hangs up before the machine can click on. She should get one of those caller IDs, she thinks as she helps Brandon fight his way out of his hand-me-down snowsuit.
“Do a dance, do a dance,” sings Adam. “Baby’s gonna poop his pants.”
“Don’t talk to your brother like that.”
“You should’ve given him diapers for Christmas, Mum.”
“Enough, Adam.”
Brandon is crying, his face red from cold or shame or panic or a combination of all three. Rose can’t untangle his feet from his boots, so she picks him up under the armpits and runs to the bathroom, for once grateful for the sure footing of shag carpets.
“It’s gonna fall out, Mumma, hurry!”
Just in time, she gets him on the toilet.
Adam, blocking the bathroom doorway, is still singing about diapers as Brandon, perched on the seat with his feet dangling inches off the floor, covers his face with his hands and sobs, and this, thinks Rose, is motherhood, an endless string of scenes that might be hilarious if they weren’t so completely miserable and defeating.
“Poopy butt, poopy butt—”
“Damn it, Adam, go to your—”
“Guess our mom is just a slut.”
Adam is glaring at her with something beyond rage.
“Where did you learn that word?” asks Rose, even though she already knows.
“I don’t remember.”
“When did your father teach you that word?”
“After New Year’s,” Adam says after a few moments. “I told him about you and Nate being boyfriend-girlfriend.”
She thinks back to the night in Nate’s kitchen, the way they might have been close to something, until they caught Adam watching them.
“Nate isn’t my boyfriend,” she says. “And even if he was, you can’t use words like that. Do you know what that word means?”
Adam squirms, looking nervous. When they had a watered-down version of The Talk last year, it involved a lot of other words he found funny, but this wasn’t one of them.
